So to our great relief we have woken up today to see our eBay seller matrix reloaded and once again all is calm. We have kept our ‘eBay Top-rated Seller’ status!

So what happened?

As many of you will know over the last few months eBay has changed its requirements for achieving Top-Rated Seller Status.

Gone are DSR’s, gone is the power of negative feedback to be replaced by a supposedly more seller friendly requirements/ seller matrix focusing on 4 main areas.

Transactional Defects – Each Needs to be below 4% on Evaluation

Cancellations for being out of stock. – This is completely fair; the last thing a buyer wants is to order an item to be told maybe days later that it is out of stock. This is a bad customer experience and the seller should accept that their stock control did not perform appropriately.

Cases closed without seller resolution – Again perfectly acceptable, the dispute console is perfectly adequate to deal with all concerns without a buyer having to escalate it too get eBay involved.

Returns Rate – this needs to be below 4%. For us that is fine, however I wonder how clothing companies are doing with this?

Late Delivery Rate

This was our problem.

We have 6043 transaction of those we have 60 late delivery marks this is 1% so we are fine you may think?

NO the assessment is only on the people who Leave feedback in this case only 1559, so only 25%.

Most people do not leave feedback. Most of the time is because they received their order with no problems on time all good, so why would they bother?The amount of people that had left feedback was only 1559 and with 60 negatives gave us an eye-wateringly close 3.85%

Do you think this is wrong? Surely eBay should take a transaction with no feedback into account in the end 4% results?

We sell cosmetics of low value Monday to Friday and post out every day we had adopted the model of 2nd class un-tracked postage. However with the focus shifting to tracked delivery as proof it seems this is no longer good enough. Tracked delivery for us would not work as the extra say £1 cost would wipe out our profit.

So at the begging of March this month we realized we were on course to lose our Top seller rating!

What did we do?

Looking back our main problem were disappointed Christmas buyers that did not get their item for Christmas. This was not our fault, however understandably disappointed customers gave us a slow delivery score.

Solution – Frustratingly next year we will be considering not posting out the last half of December . This could paradoxically lead to us having a poor sales month over Christmas.

The other was customer over expectation.

we upped our postage to 1st class. However we kept the advert showing that we posted out 2nd class. This way we would over deliver and the customer would be pleased.

We changed the cut off time for same day postage to 1-pm but actually we take it as 2-pm. This way we would over deliver and the customer would be pleased.

We started to immediately leave complementary feedback on payment and so the customer starts their experience on a high.This way we would over deliver and the customer would be pleased.

We also put a playful note on our invoice politely stating how harmful negative delivery ratings can be. This way we over deliver and the customer would be pleased.

Did it work?

YES Just about! In taking action at the beginning of this month we managed to put the brakes on the screaming train heading to the abyss. However for the last 2 weeks 1, Yes 1 late delivery report would of toppled us. However we made it and this month we have only 1 late delivery mark and are sitting comfortably at 2.68%.

The point is out of 6043 transactions we were only being assessed on 1559 of them and by their nature the slant of these were biased.

eBay I ask you surely all of our transaction need to be taken into consideration?